Languages of South Asia in the context of "Ghazal"

A Subah is a term for a province or state in several South Asian languages. It was introduced by the Mughal Empire to refer to its subdivisions or provinces; and was also adopted by other polities of the Indian subcontinent. The word is derived from Arabic and Persian. The governor/ruler of a Subah was known as a subahdar (sometimes also referred to as a "Subeh"), which later became subedar to refer to an officer in the Indian and Pakistani armies. The subahs were established by Padishah (emperor) Akbar during his administrative reforms of the years 1572–1580; initially, they numbered 12, but his conquests expanded the number of subahs to 15 by the end of his reign. Subahs were divided into Sarkars, or districts. Sarkars were further divided into Parganas or Mahals. His successors, most notably Aurangzeb, expanded the number of subahs further through their conquests. As the empire began to dissolve in the early 18th century, many subahs became de facto independent or came under the influence of the Marathas or the suzerainty of the East India Company.

In the modern context, subah (صوبہ) is used in several Pakistani languages (most notably Punjabi, Balochi, and Urdu) to refer to a province of Pakistan.

Sindhi (سِنڌِي‎, Sindhī, [sɪndʱiː]) is an Indo-Aryan language belonging to the Indo-Iranian branch of the Indo-European language family. It is primarily spoken by the Sindhi people native to the Pakistani province of Sindh, where the language has official status. It constitutes the mother tongue of over 34 million people in Pakistan, primarily concentrated in Sindh; with historic communities in neighbouring Balochistan as well. It is also spoken by 1.7 million people in India, mostly by the descendants of partition-era migrants; with it having the status of a scheduled language in the country without any state-level official status. Sindhi is written in the Sindhi alphabet of the Perso-Arabic script, the sole official script for the language in Pakistan; while in India, both the Perso-Arabic and Devanagari scripts are used.

With over 37 million native speakers, Sindhi is a major South Asian language, being the most-widely spoken language in southern Pakistan and third most-widely spoken in the entirety of Pakistan (after Punjabi and Pashto). The language is also geographically spread out of South Asia as it is spoken by the Sindhi diaspora, present around the world, primarily in the Gulf states, the Western world and the Far East.

The Bhagavata Purana (Sanskrit: भागवतपुराण; IAST: Bhāgavata Purāṇa), also known as the Srimad Bhagavatam (Śrīmad Bhāgavatam), Srimad Bhagavata Mahapurana (Śrīmad Bhāgavata Mahāpurāṇa) or simply Bhagavata (Bhāgavata), is one of Hinduism's eighteen major popular Puranas (Mahapuranas) and central text in Vaishnavism. Composed in Sanskrit and traditionally attributed to Veda Vyasa, it promotes bhakti (devotion) towards god Vishnu. Like other Puranas, it discusses a wide range of topics including cosmology, astronomy, genealogy, geography, legend, music, dance, yoga and culture.

The text consists of twelve books (skandhas or cantos) totalling 335 chapters (adhyayas) and 18,000 verses. The tenth book, with about 4,000 verses, has been the most popular and widely studied. It is widely available in almost all Indian languages and was the first Purana to be translated into a European language, as a French translation of a Tamil version appeared in 1788 and introduced many Europeans to Hinduism and 18th-century Hindu culture during the colonial era.

Languages of India belong to several language families, the major ones being the Indo-Aryan languages spoken by 78.05% of Indians and the Dravidian languages spoken by 19.64% of Indians; both families together are sometimes known as Indic languages. Languages spoken by the remaining 2.31% of the population belong to the Austroasiatic, Sino–Tibetan, Tai–Kadai, Andamanese, and a few other minor language families and isolates. According to the People's Linguistic Survey of India, India has the second highest number of languages (780), after Papua New Guinea (840). Ethnologue lists a lower number of 456.

Article 343 of the Constitution of India stated that the official language of the Union is Hindi in Devanagari script, with official use of English to continue for 15 years. Opposition to increased Hindi usage in South India led to the passage of the Official Languages Act in 1963, amending the constitution to allow for the continuation of English alongside Hindi in the Indian government indefinitely. The form of numerals to be used for the official purposes of the Union are "the international form of Indian numerals", which are referred to as Arabic numerals in most English-speaking countries. Despite some misconceptions, Hindi is not the national language of India; the Constitution of India does not give any language the status of national language.

Shri (/ʃriː/; Sanskrit: श्री, romanized: Śrī, pronounced [ɕriː]) is a Sanskrit term denoting resplendence, wealth and prosperity, primarily used as an honorific.

The word is widely used in South and Southeast Asian languages such as Hindi, and also among Philippine languages. It is usually transliterated as Sri, Sree, Shri, Shiri, Shree, Si, or Seri based on the local convention for transliteration. In Tamil it evolved to Tiru.

In phonetics, aspiration is a strong burst of breath that accompanies either the release or, in the case of preaspiration, the closure of some obstruents. In English, aspirated consonants are allophones in complementary distribution with their unaspirated counterparts, but in some other languages, notably most North American languages, South Asian languages and East Asian languages, the difference is contrastive.

Caribbean Hindustani (Devanagari: कैरेबियाई हिंदुस्तानी; Kaithi: 𑂍𑂶𑂩𑂵𑂥𑂱𑂨𑂰𑂆⸱𑂯𑂱𑂁𑂠𑂳𑂮𑂹𑂞𑂰𑂢𑂲; Perso-Arabic: کَیریبیائی ہندوستانی) is an Indo-Aryan language spoken by Indo-Caribbean people and the Indo-Caribbean diaspora. It is a koiné language mainly based on the Bhojpuri and Awadhi languages. These were the most-spoken languages by the Indians who came as immigrants to the Caribbean from India as indentured laborers. It is closely related to Fiji Hindi and the Bhojpuri-Hindustani spoken in Mauritius and South Africa.

Because a majority of people came from the Bhojpur region in Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, and the Awadh region in Uttar Pradesh, Caribbean Hindustani is most influenced by Bhojpuri, Awadhi and other Eastern Hindi-Bihari dialects. Hindustani (Standard Hindi-Standard Urdu) has also influenced the language due to the arrival of Bollywood films, music, and other media from India. It also has a minor influence from Tamil and other South Asian languages. The language has also borrowed many words from Dutch and English in Suriname and Guyana, and English and French in Trinidad and Tobago. Many words unique to Caribbean Hindustani have been created to cater for the new environment that Indo-Caribbean people now live in. After the introduction of Standard Hindustani to the Caribbean, Caribbean Hindustani was seen by many Indo-Caribbean people as a broken version of Hindi, however due to later academic research it was seen as deriving from Bhojpuri, Awadhi, and other dialects and was in fact not a broken language, but its own unique language mainly deriving from the Bhojpuri and Awadhi dialects, and not the Khariboli dialect like Standard Hindi and Urdu did, thus the difference.